The Girl in the Park

Another movie which owes a lot to Sigourney Weaver's talent.She excels in portraying mothers with a strong guilty feeling (see "a map of the world" ).She is sadly unsupported by the rest of the cast ,but one must write that their caricatured bourgeois straight characters (particularly the daughter-in-law and Weaver's listless husband) throw the movie off balance.

All that concerns the mother ,desperately trying to recreate a dear one gone for a long time (when she was a little girl) ,is sometimes interesting.It does not renew the subject ,as old as the hills (Hitchcock's "Vertigo"(1958) ;Feyder's "Le Grand Jeu"(1934);Claude Miller's "Mortelle Randonnée" (1983) Losey's " secret Ceremony" (1968):Losey's movie depicting a "mother"/"daughter" relationship is similar to "the girl..." if we reverse the roles).

Best moment:Weaver thanking her family for welcoming "Maggie" .

What a surprise. Collipol's comments were right on. I guess people either hated this or loved it. I think it's really about how much we all want love fulfilled, how we cope with catastrophic loss, how far we are willing to go to fill that empty space, and how far the people who love us are willing to support us. Weaver made a wonderful transition from happy mom to a cold, disconnected woman, and back and forth again. Any woman with a "favorite child" or a personal and crippling loss can empathize - but I am astounded by the story and the performances.

The young woman who suckers Weaver is off-putting at first, an instant irritant, but by the end of the movie you really want her to love her new "mom" and you really want Weaver to have the daughter she never got to grow up with. It doesn't matter anymore whether she is or she isn't for reals, they become what they both want. Several scenes touched me so deeply I was stunned. It would have been so easy to make this a thriller, or maudlin, or predictable, but the director did not. It was engaging, mysterious, warm, frightening, very sad, sweet, and very deeply moving. The end was perfect; subtle and let you absorb it all on your own. I thoroughly enjoyed every performance - they all were extremely well thought out, well executed, beautifully written and they all added together for a delicate and meaningful story. Do it again! Please.

I caught this movie on late night TV. It started quite promisingly with the gut-wrenching disappearance of Weaver's little daughter while playing in the park. But -- flash to sixteen years late -- mother is still going around bitter, crabbed and half-mad -- an impossible burden to her family, and everyone else. I am afraid I had no patience with her. Her son and daughter-in-law are supportive. Her ex has tried for years to get her out of her prolonged misery, but clearly she is content to stay engulfed in it. She then, as one of her weird behaviours, befriends a pretty little slut (Bosworth), who cons her out of her money, moves into her flat , and roundly abuses her hospitality mindlessly. It then gets worse, all totally unbelievable. Give it a miss.

My only criticism of this film is in the casting of the son, Chris. He is shorter than Sigourney Weaver and this is genetically impossible. That said, all the actors did a great job. And just HOW did SW look so convincing as both a thirty and a fifty-year old? Some credit to the make up department, sure - but it was the subtle change in the set of her jaw, the rigidity of her body vs fluidity in the early scenes ... The fact that the secondary characters aroused curiosity added to the atmosphere - someone els has complained that their potential stories were not developed. But this was all part of Julia's withdrawal from the World, her loss of interest in anyone after she lost her child.

Haunted by the disappearance of her 3 year old daughter 15 years ago, Julia Sandburg (Sigourney Weaver) can't find any joy even with his son Chris (Alessandro Nivola) and his fiancé Celeste (Keri Russell) being pregnant. She helps Louise (Kate Bosworth) when she steals a pair of sunglasses and gives her some money later on. Louise awakens something in Julia, but it is obvious that Louise can't be trusted. Julia feels a connection to Louise and it soon becomes a question of whether Julia is actually her child Maggie.

It's a slow moving indie. Sigourney Weaver brings her A game. Her performance keeps the attention in a tense understated manner. Kate Bosworth is well cast in this. She has a blend of innocence and vulnerability as well as something darker underneath. It's not certain what her true motives are most of the time. One can really see the pain on Weaver while not being able to pinpoint Bosworth's character. There is this uneasy tension throughout as Julia adopts the mother role to Louise. There are some missing scenes in this movie. My logic mind kept asking the movie to do a paternity test ala Maury.